No problem
Actually the fact, that an emerge update world doesn't exit with an error message can be considered a bug. You can do an emerge <anything> world and it doesn't exit with an error message, even in the newest Portage 1.9.5. Maybe you should file a bug report.

No problem
Actually the fact, that an emerge update world doesn't exit with an error message can be considered a bug. You can do an emerge <anything> world and it doesn't exit with an error message, even in the newest Portage 1.9.5. Maybe you should file a bug report.

I think I will. It's not altogether intuitive, without at least a message saying "are you sure you didn't want to do..."

Also, the man page for emerge makes no mention of the --update argument, which is why I incorrectly assumed --update == update.